Mali - Overview of economy

Mali is among the 10 or so poorest countries in the world. The economy
is a heavily dependent on agriculture, but the country's land is
more than half desert or semi-arid. Most of the agriculture is
restricted to the area irrigated by the floodwaters of the river Niger.
About 80 percent of the
labor force
is engaged in farming and fishing and about 10 percent of the
population is nomadic. The industrial activity in Mali is concentrated
on agricultural processing and gold mining.

Economic planning since independence from France in 1960 has generally
been incoherent and unsuccessful. Problems have been compounded by the
fact that export prices fell relative to import prices between 1985 and
1994. But even though Mali remained heavily dependent on foreign aid
(mostly from France), the economy was starting to show signs of
improvement by 1997 from
liberalization
efforts suggested by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Mali is already sub-Saharan Africa's leading cotton producer, and
cotton is the country's main export, which makes its economy
particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in world prices for cotton. To
reduce the economy's heavy dependence on cotton, the government
has implemented an IMF-recommended
structural adjustment program
which aims to liberalize the economy and to make it more dependent on
markets than on planning and state-owned enterprises.

The success of Mali's economic reforms and the 50 percent
devaluation
of the CFA franc in January 1994 led to an economic recovery in the
late 1990s. Several
multinational corporations
increased gold mining operations between 1996 and 1998, and the
government anticipates that Mali will become a major African gold
exporter in the near future. At the beginning of the 21st century,
economic growth in Mali is expected to be faster than population growth,
leading to steady improvements in living standards.